POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS ARE always messy.
Complicated issues are summarized deceptively.
Irrelevancies are magnified.
Substantive issues are minimized.
Incumbents take credit for favorable conditions they inherited.
People are blamed for situations over which they had no control, or even influence.
Challengers are dismissed as unqualified for having no less — just different — experience than the incumbents had when first elected.
Endorsements that are simply examples of Democrats endorsing Democrats and Republicans endorsing Republicans are presented as being of huge significance.
Endorsements by interest groups reflect whether the incumbent’s past performance — or promises of future action — please the group.
However, constituencies often voice demands that ignore the limits of fiscal — or other — reality, and vote-hungry candidates may make promises, whether the desired outcome lies within the purview of the office being sought or not.
Muck comes from all sides.
Supporters cry foul at the excesses of people with opposing views, while engaging in equally offensive excesses.
What is dirty is in the mind of the definer.
One advocate’s proclamation of the true facts is another’s slanderous defamation.
As if local rhetoric weren’t sufficiently off-putting, out-of-area special interests with deep pockets invaded some North Olympic Peninsula races, subverting what had been gentlemanly, issues-focused campaigns.
Ironically, one e-mail from a Washington, D.C.-based PAC — political action committee — bemoaned the “barrage of negative attacks and an avalanche of third-party spending,” while begging me to send money to buy ads attacking the adversaries of the PAC’s pet candidates here and in Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire.
Wouldn’t that make me a third-party spender?
Perhaps helping air an attack ad phrased so as to confuse naive voters as to even who’s been in office and who would be new?
Request deleted.
Voters aren’t innocent bystanders.
Negative and deceptive campaigning is popular with political strategists because it gets results.
However, when political posturing gets unbearably mucky, some people drop out.
They simply choose not to participate.
They don’t register.
They don’t vote.
This year, campaigning got too mucky for my husband and me.
We did the only thing we could.
Instead of voting on Election Day, as is our preference, we marked our ballots a week early.
I delivered them to the courthouse on Wednesday.
Looking at the new faces participating in 2008 and now in 2010, it’s good to see young people and older people who had dropped out, shouldering their civic duty anew, although newcomers’ political naivete may contribute to over-the-top rhetoric.
A larger factor fostering uncivil discourse is vastly differing political philosophies.
However, campaigning needn’t be nasty to succeed, even when dealing with high-stakes issues.
“A calm, reasoned, direct appeal” was the “public support strategy” adopted by suffragists a century ago, wrote Legislative Liaison Holli Johnson in the November Washington State Grange News.
“The Washington campaign was planned to convince male voters without antagonizing them, which proved highly successful,” Johnson wrote, extolling the Grange’s role in winning the right for women — make that responsibility — to vote.
Admitting women to the ranks of voters didn’t permanently clean up the election process.
Nevertheless, it is the duty of every citizen who can legally vote to become informed and to vote thoughtfully, regardless of whether one is encouraged or dismayed by the predictions coming from nationwide opinion pollsters.
The only poll that counts is the count taken on Election Day.
Your ballot won’t count unless it’s returned or postmarked by 8 p.m. Tuesday.
________
Martha Ireland was a Clallam County commissioner from 1996 through 1999.
She is on the administrative staff of Serenity of House of Clallam County, co-owns a Carlsborg-area farm with her husband, Dale, and is active in the local Republican Party, among other community endeavors.
Her column appears every Friday. E-mail: irelands@olypen.com.
